Cigarettes and Dark Arts
by BoredCoral
Summary: Coral, Hogwarts' new student is weird. She spends all day smoking in the bathroom and her sarcastic ways and destructive personality make it hard to get through to her, oppositely to her twin sister Ginger, Gryffindor's very own Miss Perfect. But beneath the new arrival's mysterious beauty lies a dangerous amount of dark power… so what or rather whom will it take to unlock it?


**Short summary:**

**This year at Hogwarts weird things have been going on. Everything's melted into a chaos of secret-mongering, whispers, late night meet up's and cigarettes and something too dark to define. It is said that new powers, shady ones, are rising from the inner rows of the students to take over the regiment and there is this strange rumour about some secret circle… To top it all, Levis Darkmorth is back at school, not only to turn countless young witches' head's (and maybe some throats too…) with his unearthly good looks and dangerously sharp tongue, but also to complete something different… And when Coral, Hogwarts' new student from France, arrives, the school is put _completely_ out of balance. The young girl spends all day smoking in the bathroom, ignoring every rule and her sarcastic ways and destructive personality make it hard to get through to her, always causing trouble. She sure is the opposite of her twin sister, Ginger Brighton, Gryffindor's very own Miss Perfect... ****Only one thing is sure, this year Hogwarts will experience some drama of a very different kind. Be ready for a time full of chaos, friendship, rivalry, hate, love and lot's of Dark Arts…**

* * *

Cigarettes, always cigarettes

After the boy across from her had sneezed frighteningly loud for the third and hopefully last time, Coral Brighton opened her eyes. The first rays of blue-ish evening light climbed through the glass without knocking. She pretended like she was still sleeping with the hope they would go away. They didn't.

Her fingers lightly ran across the freezing surface of the train's windows in circles, tracing the pattern the dirt had crated over the years. Her reflection was no surprise. Coral was as always pale as chalk and her hair, before held up in a bun, was now falling onto her back in its usual long pastel pink way.

The whole ride the bloodless new arrival had sat there, numbly facing the ground and not moving an inch, constantly torn between killing herself or everyone around her. She'd always been a girl with quite a temper. Maybe that was the reason she was transferred from Beauxbatons to Hogwarts. "_As a student of honour…" As if!, _she smirked.

God she really couldn't believe this was actually happening. Exiled to England. Things like that only happened in movies!

"Oh, you're alive?!" the familiar silvery-soft voice beside her appeared. Coral turned her head to find the two big wide chocolate brown eyes that belonged to her sister uncomfortably close to her face. _Unfortunately!,_ she thought.

"Morning." Coral deadpanned as she stared right past Ginger (didn't want to see her face) at another student who looked just like a kid she sometimes saw on the bus. She didn't bother tacking the _good_ in front of the morning. It was hard for her to lie without having her coffee first. She rubbed her eyes, sleepy blue and unsteady, in contrast to her sister's ones. Her head was too heavy to carry, so she kept it down.

"It's quarter past eight, sis! And hey, will you be fine already?" Ginger moaned in annoyance. "Aren't you excited?"

"Actually no…" the rose-haired witch answered in an indifferent voice and crawled deeper into her favourite jeans jacket.

She looked at the watch around her ankle and couldn't decide if she felt like it was late or early because her mind was too weary to find any point of reference. She swallowed what was left in the coke bottle in front of her.

"Well you will be soon… Think of all these delicious guys waiting! I swear, you'll get used to Hogwarts soon. Just promise me you'll behave…" Ginger giggled.

Coral hissed. That was just typical for her beautiful, seemingly ever so happy twin sister with fire hair. Needless to say that she and her warmhearted friendly ways had been sorted into Gryffindor. Little did all those applauding students know that the bittersweet girl had a twin sister maybe a little less "good-natured"...

"Man, it really does suck that you didn't get into Gryffindor." Ginger looked at her sister with pity all over her face. Not that Coral would have noticed, she was still looking at the student in the row across, who was using her coat as a blanket even though she was offered a proper one and spread it half across the aisle.

The pale witch fished a lipstick out of her battered backpack that accompanied her wherever she went. While fiddling around with a little thread that had loosened from her seat, she applied the dark red colour onto her lips mirror-less. Only one of the things she was good at. Pissing off the headmistress at Beauxbatons would be another.

"But then again you're _so_ much more Slytherin…" Ginger shook her head and tucked her long silky smooth hair behind her ear. She had melted brown sugar for her eyes, the kind that kept you staring when you looked at them and the way her flaming strands fell onto her Hogwarts cloak it was no wonder the boys were queuing up to date her.

Coral started drawing shapes with the tips of her fingers into the seat; rivers and forests, to distract herself from doing anything stupid. Step by step all the students slowly came back to life and the train was filled with the dull background noise of wizards quietly talking. The rain smudged the orbs of color against the windows as they battled forward against the weather. Of course it was raining, of course…

By the time they arrived and got out of the train, the rain made it hard to look across the street and strangely the scents of crackers and Cauldron Cakes were still mingling in the soaked 's sister lowered her sight so her mascara wouldn't smudge onto her cheeks as they walked along Hogsmeade Station, a miserably small place that looked so very much like the grey-ish image of England that had swirled around in Coral's head. She believed the only reason railway stations were so damn awful was to make the prospect of riding in a metal cage for several hours more appealing.

"The weather is absolute shit here, you know…" the pale-faced cursed as she tried to put on a cigarette, soaking wet in the split of a second.

"Put that away!" Ginger flicked the cigarette onto the tracks. "You don't want to get caught with those here!"

"Oh please…" the pale witch raised an eyebrow.

Her sister pointed at Coral's old backpack with an unabashed disgusted expression on her face. "Give me your cigarettes!" she demanded.

"Yeah, right…" the rose haired witch smiled coldly and then turned round, the clattering of her skinny knees in the cold wind making it hard for her to look indifferent.

"It would have been a good idea to put on some _tights_, sis…" Ginger laid one arm around the freezing witch's shoulders on the way to the draughty Hogwarts carriages.

"It would have been a good idea to come up with a school uniform that _doesn't_ automatically guarantee a cold…" Coral whispered in return and enveloped in another layer of knit-cardigans. She looked like she always did, strange and provocative and lots of people constantly flipped about the way she didn't seem to care about anything.

"You can really be a pain in the ass, you know?" Ginger spat. "I'm just trying to be as nice as I can and frankly, you're giving me a really hard time."

"Oh don't do me no favours…" the rose-haired witch replied. "Feel free to act as you want, I really don't need anyone faking to like me…"

"Good."

"Great…"

The two sisters stared at each other in silence. This was just exactly the way Coral had imagined it to be coming to Hogwarts. Awkward and uncomfortable. She didn't know what the hell everyone's problem was. A school like Beauxbatons should be able to handle some rebellious teens and not just ship them to England as soon as problems accrued! Actually, she did know what the problem was. The answer swirled in the twenty-five packages of cigarettes in her suitcase, the one cigarette in her left hand and the lighter in her right one. She hated rules and constrictions. And then there was the thing with her dad... autch. There it was again, that familiar pain in her chest.

The pale witch bit her tongue as she wasn't able to put on any of her soaking wet Marlboro's, a problem that was new to her. She growled. There was something so magnificent and graceful about hitting a new low in a new place. Some stupid song was playing on her sister's iPod so loud that Coral was able to hear it and she noticed how inexpressive and blank it was. She smirked — at her sister, herself, her sorry state, Hogwarts and the stupid song that just rounded the situation up in an ironically perfect way.

The drone of the hundreds of voices in the Great Hall drowned the sound of the pale witch's ankle boots on the cold stone floor. The bewitched ceiling looked like the sky outside, dark and stirringly grey and just so very English. Coral felt like screaming. She hated rain, she hated wet clothes, she hated the fact that she was standing in the middle of a crowded hall that suddenly grew utterly silent, the only sound being the whispers of the students filling the room like smoke silently dragging out.

Her sister skipped over to a bouquet of girls with pastel headbands, huddled in their red-and-yellow embellished coats. They were three, stuck together as if attached at the hip, in a way that Coral found ridiculous and intimidating at the same time. _So there's a cool girl's club here too…, _she thought. _How incredibly annoying._ They looked like those kind of girls that bogusly assigned themselves unique personas (one was "the smart one," the other "the crazy one") when in reality they were basically interchangeable in every way. But they reminded the pale witch of the kind of friendship she never had.

Coral felt a million eyes on her back as she sat down alone at the long wooden Slytherin table and half-heartedly scooped some food onto her plate. The words _new girl_ were pouring out into the damp hall's air like the glass pearls on her floor at home as she once ripped the dangling curtains in rage.

"Hello sunshine, killed anyone today?" a voice practically dripping of sarcasm approached the chalk-colored witch, who was hiding her face behind a layer of pastel pinkness because she was under the serious observation of a dozen nosy wizards.

She raised her head. A boy from across stared at the knife in her hand that violently tortured the fried egg in front of her. His mouth was curled in amusement.

"The day isn't over yet, is it?" Coral hissed back and stared him right in the eye, well aware of how good-looking he was, dark blonde hair smooth with this unnatural shine, like newly minted money and eyes unnaturally piercingly green. She felt her stomach doing funny things. The table went silent, a few more 14-year-old's eavesdropping on her conversation than the bloodless girl was confident with. Then he smiled.

"Julien Haynesworth." He reached his hand across the table. "Captain of the Quidditch team, Winner of the Defense against the Dark Arts Cup, the legend, the myth, the dream…"

For a moment Coral wasn't sure if he was joking or not but then he grinned, showing off a row of perfectly white teeth.

"Uh-hugh." she knitted her browns, staring at his hand that was waiting in vain to be shaken. Hogwarts guys. She should have known better.

"Autch…" Julien formed the word with his lips in silence as he pulled back his palm, still smirking and not seeming to be upset at all. He tilted his head to the right, and his crooked, left-sided grin grew even brighter, claiming possession over the amusement in his voice.

"May I ask for your name then?" he insisted in a broad British accent, pulling his sleeves over his wrists because it was freezing in the giant hall. How was it possible to invest in such a spectacular ceiling but completely forget about simple things like heating? _So _English…

"You do realize you have to interact with your peers at some point, don't you? I mean, you can't avoid people for ever…" Julien remarked when Coral didn't make an effort to answer him.

"Just so you know, I'd be free to… _interact_ with whenever you want…" a boy a few seats away shouted and the table burst into laughter.

"Oh sweetie, in what world?" Coral smiled back bittersweet. The pale witch cleared her throat loudly and turned to face some staring second years who lowered their sights quickly, eyes wide in shock.

"Jeez, no need to be such a bitch…" Julien laughed as he lavishly buttered a toast from both sides.

"Excuse me?!"

"Oh don't take him too seriously, Mr. golden boy here just isn't used to rejection…" A tiny girl squeezed herself in the spot next to Julien and let her plate fall onto the table in such a loud way Coral didn't think was possible for a person of that delicate statue. She paused, pushed her glasses up the bridge of her nose, then added: "It really must be hard to have at least one girl who isn't gonna drop dead for you…" Her lashes were brushing against her glasses and her dark brown hair was in a short pixie cut that made her look witty and cute.

"Yeah thanks Poppy, love you too." Julien rolled his eyes at her, but his face lit up as she sucker-punched him in the side in a hilariously weak way.

"Always glad to help… And you are?" the girl turned to Coral, mouth filled with some sort of sandwich.

"Coral Brighton…"

"What a beautiful…"

"Don't you dare say it…" Coral interrupted Julien, who lifted his hand and formed a silent _never mind_.

"No way… You're the new girl! Ginger Brighton's twin sister!" Poppy ignored Julien and almost spat out her sandwich, coughing a few times and after a couple of _bless-you's_ by the house ghosts was able to gather herself.

"No shit Sherlock! They_ totes_ look the same… Like the face and all." Julien wildly gestured in front of the new witch's nose, which made her feel a bit uncomfortable.

"You did not just say totes?" Poppy looked at Julien in played shock.

"You did not just have sex with that Gryffindor guy yesterday…" he retorted smugly.

Poppy shrugged her shoulders in guilt. "...'round goes to you, asshole… By the way, I'm Poppy De Rege and Julien here most likely already gave you the whole "Captain of the Quidditch team" speech, right?"

"You bet…" Coral smirked.

"Just so you know, the Defense against the Dark Arts thing is a fat lie…" Poppy giggled. "He wasn't the actual winner… There were two…the other guy, Levis…"

"Yeah, yeah shut up Poppy…" Julien cursed. "By the way, where is Levis today anyways?"

"Probably killing some innocent first years… or screwing some equally innocent Ravenclaw babes, who knows?" Poppy faced the new witch, suddenly serious. "Just do me one favor, do not under any circumstances fall in love with him, understood?"

Coral stared at her without understanding. "Why would I do that?" she joked.

"You'll know…believe me…" Poppy whispered.

"Well, I promise I won't, I guess."

"Yeah, and since she seems to be an emotionless robot, that shouldn't be too big of a problem…" Julien patted the pale witch's shoulder.

"Oh fuck you…" Coral laughed. It felt like it had been a hundred years since she had last laughed, sincerely. She stroked her cloak, the material stiff with the English cold weather. But strangely, she really didn't mind.

"And before I forget…" Poppy laid her arm around Julien "…**welcome to Slytherin!**"


End file.
